PINBALL M
A
G
A
Z
I
N
Supplement to Pinball Magazine No. 5 Interview with John Osborne about: working with Wayne Neyens, John’s game designs, prototypes, Gottlieb’s transformation to solid-state and more
E
5
Feedback on Pinball Magazine No. 5 • • •
•
•
•
•
•
•
I ordered on August 30th also and just received it yesterday. Well worth the wait (or weight... this is a seriously thick magazine)!- Gorgonzola
•
Great Great
•
I am sure this has been said many times but Thank You for creating such an Amazing book to grow this hobby and preserve the wonderful history of the many creative talents that created it. I couldn’t begin to guess how many Thousands of hours it took to collect, edit, write, and produce something this monumental. To call it a magazine is a huge understatement. Sincere bravo to you for creating this for all to enjoy. Thanks!! – Yelobird
•
Volume 5 arrived at my home in England last week. I was very pleased with it and eagerly anticipate further volumes – hopefully on Williams – Peter Dawson
What a fantastic job you have done on the Wayne Neyens issue number 5. I received mine this afternoon and have spent the rest of the daylight hours starting to read every word, study each picture, and just enjoy the book. I have so far just skimmed the stories after the Wayne articles, but I will sure read every word. – Will White
•
My copy (and the beautiful post cards) arrived a couple of days ago. I just flipped through it and it looks great, but I haven’t had time to sit down and read it. I shall do so this weekend. Thanks for your efforts and research. I know there is a lot that goes into this and it is a niche market at that, so I really do appreciate the work involved. – Jim Walser
I received my magazine this afternoon! It is beautiful, amazing, incredible, fantastic . . . well words fail me. Thanks for putting it together and for including my content. It arrived in perfect condition...great mailer. I have not had a chance to read it yet but will be spending as much time with it as I can over the next few days. Keep up the great work! – Bob Herbison
•
Honored to be part of it! – Jack Danger
•
An ball
•
Great article on Wayne. I can see why it took so much time and effort to put it together. – John Buras
•
Jonathan, the latest print issue was an excellent way to document so many great wood-rail pinball machines. I always liked the antique early flipper machines. Now I know more about them and really want one. – Richard Pastore
•
Fantastic issue – I was glued to mine every spare moment after I got it. Great read, and a keeper that I know I’ll take out and re-read every so often.Great work. – Daan Seavers
•
Your magazine is amazing. Still have more to read but I couldn’t believe Impressive amount of vintage photos. – Paul Faris
Reviews: Pinball News Head2Head Pinball Podcast, Episode 63, starting at the 2:00:00 mark For Amusement Only – The EM Pinball and Bingo podcast, episode 432, starting at 03:00: “It’s a fascinating read! A phenomenal piece.” Feedback on PM05 I’ve been reading the issue ALL DAY yesterday and again today – and still have a lot of Wayne’s interview to go. All I can say is this is the most interesting and treasured “book” of any in my collection. That article by Gordo was SO PACKED with incredible information that I had never heard before – PURE GOLD!!! And although I had heard bits and pieces of Wayne’s history, I’ve never seen this much detail. It’s absolutely fascinating. There is so much information that doesn’t even directly relate to Wayne – he’s just a fountain of information about the early days of the industry. Thank you SO SO MUCH for doing this issue. – Randy Peck
Received my issue with the bonus cards last week. It’s a masterpiece and a work of art. Hands-down the best printed Pinball media out there. Excellent work. – Jason Rufer Mine arrived in the UK today. Awesome. And nearly broke my wrist when the postman handed it to me! – Snux
•
I got mine a few days ago. The mailman brought it up the driveway with a hand truck. – Bryan Kelly
•
Thank you for all of the work you performed in getting this published and distributed, Jonathon! – Avidlistener
•
I started reading it yesterday and found the Wayne Neyens story riveting! Great work, Jonathan. So many details I never knew about. I think you’re getting better!! – Mark Ritchie
magazine. A real coffee table book –
outstanding literature
collectable. Shapeshifter
achievement – Antoinette
Order your copy on www.pinball-magazine.com/shop/
in
pinJohnson
John Osborne Pinball designer
Others about Wayne Neyens: Interview with John Osborne Interview: Jonathan Joosten
Pinball Magazine No. 5 focuses largely on the career in pinball of Wayne Neyens. Wayne celebrated his 100th birthday last July and he’s currently the oldest still living pinball designer that saw the industry develop from the 1930s to the invention of the flipper, all the way to the transition to solid-state pinball games. Wayne worked most of his career at D. Gottlieb. As a pinball designer, he designed 180 games. In 1965 he became Chief Engineer, and as such he still was involved in every new game design developed at Gottlieb. Wayne retired in 1980, just after Gottlieb had switched to solid-state pinball games. Besides discussing Wayne’s career in pinball with Wayne himself, Pinball Magazine No. 5 also contains a section called Others about Wayne Neyens. In this section, others discuss what they appreciate in Wayne’s game designs, or – in several cases – working with or under Wayne at Gottlieb. One of the interviews that was scheduled to be in the magazine had to be left out as the magazine maxed out on the number of pages the printer could fit into the spine. So instead this interview with pinball designer and programmer John Osborne is now available as a free downloadable supplement! Please keep in mind that while the interview below covers most of John’s career in pinball, the emphasis was to tie in with the cover story on Wayne Neyens in Pinball Magazine No. 5. PM: John, to start things off, how did you get into pinball? John Osborne: I’ve always been interested in pinball. I can remember as a child my father holding me up so I could watch the balls roll down. We got a game when I was six or seven years old. My dad got it from a friend, a 1939 Bally Vogue. This was a pre-flipper game, and I loved that game. I remember exactly the colors and how it worked. Later we got rid of it, and I always wanted to get a game. Then finally my dad found somebody who had one for sale, and I bought it for $10
for my 12th birthday. That was a Chicago Coin Sally, which is still in my collection. From then on, whenever I could afford it, and something came along, I just added it to the collection. It wasn’t always pinball, but I preferred pinball. I had a shuffle ally (Chicago Coin Name Bowler), a Genco gun game, a 6-player Williams baseball game, but the other games I had in the pre-Gottlieb days were a bingo game or a flipper game. So I’ve had games most of my life. PM: How did you get acquainted with Wayne? 3
Others about Wayne Neyens
John Osborne with Southpaw. This was an electromechanical pinball game he built from scratch as a college project. The game has a plunger on the left and a black cabinet, two features that at that point had not been done yet.
John Osborne: Interestingly, I knew Wayne before I met him. It was in my early college years that I had begun corresponding with Wayne. I was still in school, and I would write to Gottlieb asking for some information, or some technical questions, and it was almost always Wayne who answered. In that way, we knew each other. At the time I was involved with Teletype equipment as a hobby and used the printer to write letters. Not over the air, but just using the Teletype machine as a typewriter, including those to Wayne. It turned out that he had been a Teletype operator and repairman during the war! It made another connection between us. [Wayne Neyens discusses his Teletype days during the war in-depth in Pinball Magazine No. 5 – PM] As I was nearing graduation from Cal State University at Fresno, I applied to almost all the game companies out there. I did not apply to Chicago Coin because I really thought they were kind of a slack company. From my previous correspondence with them (regarding Sally and Name Bowler) they seemed careless and old-fashioned. My best response was, predictably, from Gottlieb. They wanted me to come in for an interview. When they sent me that letter that said they would like me to come to the plant in Northlake to discuss employment you can imagine how I felt! It was in May of 1972 that I went for the interview. Wayne met me at the hotel next to the plant. Later I met Judd Weinberg, I met Alvin Gottlieb, and I met Bob Smith, who was the production manager. He and Wayne interviewed me that night at a local steakhouse. At dinner, one of the questions I was asked was whether I was colorblind. They had cases where somebody in Engineering, 4
or on the line, couldn’t see the wire colors! I hadn’t thought of that one. Gottlieb had 86 color-coded wires, and some of them did look alike. For example, the brown-red wire; you had to look closely at that one to see that red tracer. We never had yellow and white on the same wire. Even from the beginning of wire control, after the war, they realized that yellow would fade, and The letter that John received, inviting him to visit the factory and discuss employement
Others about Wayne Neyens white would fade, and they would soon look alike. Thus there are no wires in the Gottlieb system with yellow and white together. After the interview they told me the next day, “If you’re happy with us, we’re certainly happy with you,” and that my start date would be the day after Labor Day. That gave me plenty of time to move. Adding to the situation, I was planning to get married. I got married that summer, and our drive across the country was our honeymoon. As someone from Southern California, I must have been a new experience for my fellow engineers. I was a long-haired surf dude right out of college.
I started in 1972, the day after Labor Day. I never worked in the shop, being directly hired into Engineering. I did general work, running test cables and playing games for percentages. They wanted someone to rewrite their service manual. It was pretty old, and it looked like it had been in a lot of hands. It was agreed that it was kind of a hodgepodge, but there was nothing else like that on the market at the time, so it had served a good purpose. I worked on re-writes and updates for a long time, but eventually, management decided that solid-state was getting close and a comprehensive manual would soon be irrelevant. Even into the solid-state era, I worked on some writing of new service information.
PM: How did your wife feel about leaving California for the Chicago area? John Osborne: She thought about it the same as I did. We didn’t know what we’re in for. We really weren’t that impressed with the Midwest. I had never lived in snow, and the only snow I had seen was up in our ski mountains, which was sort of like “play snow.” This was going to be an adventure for us. The Midwest, of course, is very different from California. The differences were greater than they are now. Having the dream job notwithstanding, I always wished I could just pick up the whole job and bring it out to California or Arizona, or something like that. We got divorced in ‘78. I met Jan two years later, and we were married in 1982. In fact, we met at Gottlieb. A friend of mine at Gottlieb – one of the maintenance men – his girlfriend knew Jan, and we started off with a blind date foursome. Coincidentally, the Monday after that weekend Jan was starting at Gottlieb. She worked in inventory control. It was a pinball romance! Actually, there were several husband and wife teams at Gottlieb. John and Jan
In March 1973 the person who was making the lightbox test fixtures left. Wayne told me to learn the fixtures and take over their construction. Each new game needed its own test fixture, and six or seven were required for the lightbox test line. That was my first real dedicated position in Engineering. After that, I was promoted to doing game modifications for international games. That was a big job. There was a lot involved because they didn’t have a universal cable for the front door and the bottom board. Each country had its own modifications as to coinage, number of chutes, input voltage and frequency. It meant a different front door and changes to the bottom board. For every game that came along all that paperwork had to be generated and I did that for a while. As an example of these modifications, say we had a new 4-player game, and we get an order from France. That meant a new front door, new coin entrance plates, a 50-Hz motor, perhaps an additional coin relay on the bottom board and all the wir5
Others about Wayne Neyens
Two employee badges from John that he had when working at Gottlieb.
ing for that. Maybe they would remove another relay, so there were many wiring changes. The most complicated game we had was for Germany. It was our only 3-chute game. The first coin chute was two coins for one play, so that meant an alternating relay. The middle chute was like a quarter chute; it could be set from two to five credits. The third chute was for five to nine credits, which meant the motor had to run twice. We had to put in a new relay strip for all the relays needed for Germany. It was many changes, but Germany was one of our biggest customers, and they bought only 4-player games. To document these modifications we had “Addition-Deletion” sheets. They listed every change, such as “Delete the 60 cycle motor, add a 50 cycle motor” and “Delete these wires, add these wires.” It was complicated because the wire changes were done like run-in sheets since they would be made in the cable department. Sometimes they had to make a whole new bottom board cable with these changes in it. When we came out with a new game, I didn’t start on any foreign cables – as we used to call them – until I got word from management. They would come in and say, “Here’s a list of sales for these countries. Do the changes for those.” Maybe a couple of days later they’d come in again and “Here’s one for Réunion Island.” As for quantity, it varied greatly. Sometimes only two games were ordered, sometimes 200. PM: You mentioned Germany, but what other countries did these games go to? John Osborne: Many countries, including France, Hong Kong, Réunion Island, the tiny Prince Edward Island, Canada, England, Israel, and Eastern Europe. There was a file for Russia, but I never made one of those. I wish I had taken those flip files when I left the company; nobody would have cared and they wouldn’t even have known. There was also a flip-file for domestic games, and it was a history of American coin pricing. From Domestic 3 (two chutes, 5-cent, and 25cent) to Domestic 22 (two chutes, both 25-cent, one play for a quarter, three for 50 cents). 6
PM: Wayne was your boss for almost eight years. How do you recall working with him? John Osborne: Wayne was in the middle of everything in Engineering. He knew of everything that was going on. I think he really relished the job, and we all worked very well together. He was, of course, part of upper management. That’s the way Dave Gottlieb had set it up. That’s the way Judd Weinberg kept things going. It worked well. We always worked well in engineering, and occasionally I saw Wayne and his wife Muriel socially. When I was typing – working on the manual – I was in his office. He gave me a table in the corner because I didn’t have a workbench to sit at yet. I heard him talking on the phone and doing various things. He knew exactly what was going on everywhere. When Ed Krynski would get a game completed, or later on when I would get a game finished, Wayne would come and look at it and play it. He said what he thought was good and what needed improving, and we would modify the game accordingly. He always knew what needed to be done and the confidence he projected gave us the confidence to handle any task or design any game. PM: So being able to work at Gottlieb must have been like a dream come true? John Osborne: Oh, yes indeed. Eventually, after a few years in Engineering, I became a game designer. PM: I assume Wayne was involved with getting you into pinball design? John Osborne: Yes he was. Up until that time, when we had a new game to play – either a hand sample or an engineering sample – Wayne asked me to play the game. We had a small room with four or five games. He wanted someone to play the games and evaluate them and eventually determine where the replay scores would be, what the recommended scorecard would be. Some people in Engineering were not that good at playing. They were just not that good at pinball, and we had some people that would win every time. Wayne didn’t want any of these people. He wanted a typical player, and that happened to be me, so I got to play games for evaluation. After I played it, I might say, “This area up here is kind of dull.
Others about Wayne Neyens How about we if we add a kicker like this?” That’s something that I would tell Wayne. Wayne would then say, “Well, this is Ed Krynski’s game. Go ask Krynski and make sure that it’s okay with him.” If Eddy said okay, I would do the physical or electrical change. I would drill a hole in the playfield, mount whatever we were going to do, do the wiring and change the wiring drawing. So I modified several games in that manner. I can point out on them where I added that bumper or that kick hole or something. However, they were still Eddy’s games. I’m not sure whether I was designing new games at this point, but we had a single-player game called Pro Football. Wayne asked me to play that game, and it had the scariest defect; it was possible for the ball to run out the out rollovers while the motor was still running. The outlane scored a touchdown if it were lit, but because the motor was still running, you would not collect the touchdown, so the game would sort of cheat you. That touchdown was very important in the game. I said, “If I ever build a game I would never allow that to happen.”
The backglass and playfield for Gridiron.
The original Pro Football game
Just coincidentally Wayne tells me to build a 2-player version of this game and that I should build it using the same playfield. I asked him if I could use a 4-player lightbox because each player had their separate scores as well as touchdown points. He told me that the 2-player should fit a 2-player lightbox. So I went ahead, but it was a crowded lightbox for sure. I built the game, which was named Gridiron, and I added a delay relay so that the player would not be cheated out of that touchdown in the outlane. I had thought about not telling Wayne, but I wasn’t sure because it had this extra relay and it 7
PINBALL SANTIAGO CIUFFO 2 8
The world’s best selling pinball book of the past three years!
www.pinball-magazine.com/shop/
Others about Wayne Neyens cost more money. After we built a production sample I asked Wayne to come over, “I want to show you something. Watch this.” So the motor is running, and the ball goes over the rollover. As soon as the motor stops running, it keeps running and scores that touchdown. I told him I added that delay relay and he thought that was a pretty good idea. PM: Pro Football was a game from January 1973, but Gridiron is from December 1977. There are almost five years in between those games. John Osborne: That’s right. This didn’t happen right after the single-player was made. I don’t know why this came along. Maybe some distributor had asked for a football-themed game, and they figured to make a 2-player out of Pro Football. I don’t know where that decision came from. One day Wayne came along when I was playing a game and said, “This is a pretty good game.” I said, “Yeah, it’s great.” He said, “You think you could do anything like this?” I responded, “Well, I don’t know. Eddy’s games are just outrageously good.” He said, “Well why don’t get a blank playboard and see if you can build up a game.” I said, “Okay” and what I built became Hit the Deck. That was the first game that I built from scratch. When Wayne played it, he said the game was pretty good, but it was kind of – what he called – “posty.” There are a lot of shots that don’t do anything because you’re frequently hitting posts. I had to agree with him; that was the main problem with it. It’s also a pretty straight sequence game because it was a single-player. PM: That game had the black electromechanical scoring reels with the red numbers in a digital type font. John Osborne: Yes, I don’t know whose idea or decision that was. I thought they looked pretty good, but a bit silly. It was almost like a nod to solid-state, which we knew was coming. After Hit the Deck I did Strange World. After that, Neptune, which was the add-a-ball version of Hit the Deck. Then I did Poseidon, which was the Italian add-a-ball version. I always liked Italian games; they seemed so versatile and powerful, and the fiveknocks for 50,000 points was such a standout. That was one nice thing about my doing single-players. Wayne would say, “Let’s make an American add-aball out of this. Go ahead and build one up.” Or he would ask for an Italian, depending on what the market 9
New in the PINBALL MAGAZINE web shop: Posters by Santiago Ciuffo € 6,50* each
Playfield detail of CENTAUR, Bally (1981). Design: Jim Patla, Art: Paul Faris.
Photo by Santiago Ciuffo, taken from his book PINBALL, published by Pinball Magazine, www.pinball-magazine.com
Backglass detail of PIN-BOT, Williams (1986). Design: Barry Oursler, Python Anghelo, Artwork: Python Anghelo.
Photo by Santiago Ciuffo, taken from his book PINBALL, published by Pinball Magazine, www.pinball-magazine.com
Poster size: 70 x 50 cm (27.6 x 19.7 inch)
GORGAR, Williams (1979). Design: Barry Oursler, Art: Constantino Mitchell, Jeanine Mitchell.
Playfield detail of TIME LINE, D. Gottlieb (1980). Design: Allen Edwall, Art: Jerry Simkus.
Photo by Santiago Ciuffo, taken from his book PINBALL, published by Pinball Magazine, www.pinball-magazine.com
Photo by Santiago Ciuffo, taken from his book PINBALL, published by Pinball Magazine, www.pinball-magazine.com
3 for € 15,00*
Playfield detail of NINE BALL, Stern Electronics (1980). Design: Steve Kirk.
Photo by Santiago Ciuffo, taken from his book PINBALL, published by Pinball Magazine, www.pinball-magazine.com
Playfield detail of XENON, Bally (1979). Design: Greg Kmiec, Art: Paul Faris.
Photo by Santiago Ciuffo, taken from his book PINBALL, published by Pinball Magazine, www.pinball-magazine.com
Also available as posters:
10 62
www.pinball-magazine.com/shop/
Others about Wayne Neyens was asking for, or if they thought this game would sell in Italy. Not every single-player game has an American and an Italian counterpart. Since you’re in Europe, do you see a lot of these Italian Add-a-Balls? PM: No, I’ve only seen them in Italy and some re-imports with American collectors. They do come up occasionally on eBay Italy. John Osborne: Well, they were not supposed to go anyplace else. They were never sold in the United States as they require 240 Volt at 50Hz. Wayne even told me, “A lot of people know about these games, but we really don’t want to chat these up if you’re ever in a place where there are a lot of pinball distributors.” Gottlieb regarded these as a secret weapon for the one area of Europe. They were not available anyplace else, and nobody else built true Italian add-a-balls like we did. PM: Wayne used to design the playfield and the circuitry of his games. Was that the case with you as well, or did you have someone to design the circuitry for you? John Osborne: No, when someone designs a game he does the whole project. We’d start off with a blank playfield and end up with a finished game in a cabinet. The blanks were provided by our wood supplier, and had the shooter flute, hand holes, the two register holes in the opposite corners, and were coated on both sides (hard-coat on top, seal coat on the underside). First, I had to figure out what I wanted, how the game is to play. Once laid out using loose parts such as posts, bumper bodies, and rollover guides, I drill the playfield for everything, including hats and rollover slots. Then a trip to the stockroom to get everything I need. If something had to be made, like a motor or a relay bank or a drop target bank, I had to write out an order and take it to the appropriate department. I then made the bottom board, set up the relays, stack the switches correctly, put the labels on and build up the bottom board. To accommodate the wires, I would attach wire clamps along the top of the relay frames to hold the wires while I was adding wires so they would stay neat. I would draw a complete schematic and assign colors. There were several rules about wire colors. Once drawn, I took it to the bench (over which were all the spools of colored wires), along 11
Decorate your gameroom with these exclusive Kevin O’Connor artwork posters
Backglass artwork for Data East’s King Kong (Only 9 prototypes built)
Magic Marker backglas sketch for Data East’s Playboy 35th Anniversary
Backglass and cabinet sketches for Data East’s Star Trek
For all (ordering) info: www.pinball-magazine.com/shop
Others about Wayne Neyens with the playfield, and began wiring and soldering one wire at a time. Afterward, I did the bottom board in the same way. We did not have to design lightboxes because all lightboxes were generally the same in terms of function. If I was making a 4-player, I would use an existing lightbox and wire to that. They were all the same unless there was a special bonus unit or something unusual. The same goes for single-player and 2-player lightboxes and add-a-balls. PM: Did you pick your own themes? John Osborne: No, the only games that I ever built where I knew what the theme was going to be was Hit the Deck and Blue Note. I knew that Hit the Deck was going to be a card game. With Blue Note, for some reason, I had music on my mind, perhaps while working on a piano. I thought a musical theme would be good and so I wanted to have eight targets representing an octave. At first, it had no name, just that it would be something with music. They could have given it some other name that was music related. Those were the only two games where I knew what the theme was going to be. PM: Blue Note was also made as an Italian adda-ball game named Rock Star (and an Italian company also made the game under the name Rocky Girl). John Osborne: Right, but the base version that we designed from was always the replay version. Solid-state PM: You mention Blue Note and the add-aball iterations of that. These came out in December of 1978. At that time other manufacturers were already manufacturing solid-state games. In the interview I did with Wayne, he is blaming himself for being too late to switch to solid-state. He’s even blaming himself for the demise of Gottlieb because of that. John Osborne: Oh, I wouldn’t agree with that. I don’t think that’s true at all. I believe pinball would have gone down no matter what. At the time, if the game is good, people will play it. Wayne wanted to wait because he knew that unless the games were perfect, they would be compared unfavorably with the current electromechanical games. He felt that what was out there at the time was not particularly good. He was right. 13
Others about Wayne Neyens change with them, so we didn’t have much to do with them. When Williams went under I wrote a lengthy article about the decline of pinball, [“The Death of a Star,” PinGame Journal, March 2000 – PM] in which I discuss several aspects of the decline resulting in Williams’ closing. I believe many factors were contributing to pinball’s demise, but that’s another subject.
We always got the competition’s games in to look at, even before solid-state. In the early days of solid-state we saw some things that made us think, “If anything is going to kill the business, it’s going to be this.” For instance, the displays that seemed to jitter annoyingly. We saw one game that had processor-controlled flippers, so the flippers were always late. These weren’t prototypes but games that were on the market. We saw Super Flipper, a pinball video game from Chicago Coin. We had it in our playing room, which had fluorescent lighting. We found out that if we turned the lights on and off quickly, the game would add replays! This was the kind of stuff we were seeing. Solid-state was just not ready for the market, and such games could jeopardize Gottlieb’s reputation for quality. Also, Wayne was a bit wary of solid-state. We all were, but he, of course, had more at stake. He didn’t fully understand it. None of us did, because we didn’t have that kind of electronic training. So he had to rely on other people, and that was something new for him. PM: If you look at the production numbers of the early solid-state games from Gottlieb, the decline that Wayne blames himself for didn’t start until after he retired in 1980. John Osborne: That is ironic because that’s when we went to our new system, System 2 which was a distinct improvement. PM: At that point in time video games were also taking over in the arcades, which may have been a factor. John Osborne: To some degree yes. We also got into that market. We had an independent plant in Bensenville – a few miles from the Northlake plant – making video games. I don’t think they did all that well. I only visited there once and never got to know those people. I don’t think there was any parts inter14
PM: If you want to look for a reason why Gottlieb went downhill in the early ‘80s, I figured it might have had to do with both Judd and Wayne retiring on the same day and new management stepping in. John Osborne: I think there’s something to be said for that. The people who took over when Judd left did their best, but they were not steeped in the business. They just didn’t have the background. The Chief Engineer that took over for Wayne was Dick Finger. He had experience in solid-state and had been assisting distributors with the conversion. He was a good manager and seemed to enjoy the position. Of course, he didn’t have the decades of industry experience Wayne had, but we knew the days of that sort of management were gone. He was a good guy, and he learned fast. I can’t really blame him for anything because management kept telling us to innovate.
Former Gottlieb president Judd Weinberg, John Osborne and Wayne Neyens at Pinball Expo
The funny thing about Wayne’s retirement is that I do not remember Wayne’s last day. I do remember when Judd left because he held a little cocktail party at the hotel next door. There was a single violinist to provide music. I was the only person from Engineering there, which I thought was kind of odd but flattering. But there was nothing like that when Wayne left. Wayne also kept coming back. He would come for meetings, and he always stopped by to see me. Judd may have come back for meetings, of course, but I didn’t see him. PM: According to Wayne he retired the same day as Judd, and they walked out the door together hand in hand. John Osborne: I really don’t remember those two events happening at the same time. Of course, I would like to have seen that. Wayne did come back several times, seemingly to help
PINBALL
L L A B N I P M
A
G
A
Z
I
N
MAGAZINE
Pinball Magazine No. 5 is here! (and it’s HUGE!)
E
5
No.5 esi, Wayne Neyens, Scott Dan ger and more
Chicago Gaming, Jack Dan -8
ISBN 978-90-816266-6
• • • • • •
•
7 Reasons to NOT buy Pinball Magazine No. 5: Your name is Wayne Neyens and you already know the story of your life By doctor’s orders you’re not supposed to lift heavy objects You’re waiting for the movie version to come out You’re waiting for someone to buy you a copy as a present (hint, hint) Your doctor only gave you six months to live and you won’t get to finish it You don’t want to risk it dropping through the letterbox and flattening the cat/dog/baby/partner You want to be that guy who doesn’t buy it
• 360 (!) pages on high quality glossy paper • It’s more like a softcover coffee table book • It weights 47 ounces • 33-page Gordon Hasse article on the career of Wayne Neyens • Most in-depth interview with Wayne Neyens ever • Great info on Gottlieb manufacturing in their EM days and transition to solid-state • Great interviews with Scott Danesi (Total Nuclear Annihilation), Gary Stern (Stern Pinball), Doug Skor (Chicago Gaming), Jack Danger (Dead Flip), Antoinette Johnson, and lots more • It’s just phenomenal, a work of art
Order your copy at: www.pinball-magazine.com/shop/ Also available with: The Pinball Resource Pinball Classics Make sure to subscribe to Pinball Magazine’s free monthly newsletter with a summary of last month’s pinball industry news. www.pinball-magazine.com Follow Pinball Magazine on Facebook for free updates and links to the free monthly Pinball Magazine & Pinball News podcast
Others about Wayne Neyens with the company and with Engineering. Apparently, they ignored any advice he offered. Innovations PM: You mentioned that the new management wanted you to innovate. Can you talk about that? Any examples? John Osborne: Yes, I built things I can’t believe never got built. I made a Skeeball pinball; I made a dice-throwing unit that we could have put in a game for maybe to indicate a bonus multiplier, or a Yahtzee game, or something like that. I still have that unit. The dice unit has a small field onto which a regular die is thrown. The die is free to move under the clear cover and, of course, the unit knows what’s been thrown. The long diagonal arm at one side is attached to a motor, and it sweeps the die back into the unit for the next go-round. This unit is more of a concept build, but I did use it briefly in a hand-sample game. The player saw just the little field down near the flippers. The game had the usual bonus lights, and when the ball ran out a die was thrown, and that became the bonus multiplier, 1X to 6X. My long-term aim for the unit was for a Yahtzee game. Yahtzee was very big at the time. It was a dice-throwing game with five dice, and the player throws various numbers of dice to try for certain combinations. I had in mind a flattop floor console with five dice units under glass. Each unit would have a hold button, and when you hit the “throw” button all nonheld units would throw their die, and the game would add the score. That idea never got beyond a few notes. Management loved the dice unit, but there was just nobody in the front office to decide, “Yes, that’s good, let’s spend some money on it and develop it.” They liked it, but there was no commitment in the waning days of the company. I was also working on a scoring post and a mini pop-bumper. Some of my hand sample games (that were not produced) sometimes seemed too “posty,” a term meaning the ball hits posts too often, resulting in no scoring and unwanted silence. It occurred to me that a remedy would be posts that scored. Bally’s mushroom bumper came to mind, but I wanted something more like a post that would be used in place of regular posts. I experimented with plastic balls and got some samples from Dim16
John’s prototype dice-throwing unit
co Gray, a hardware company specializing in knobs and handles. Our toolroom made up the samples you see in the picture. The base of the post was threaded and held against the underside of the playfield with a plastic nut. A shaft threaded into the ball extended out the bottom of the post and operated a switch when the ball rose from being hit by the playing ball. For some reason, the posts in this picture don’t have rubber rings, but the groove for the ring is visible. The design challenge was to find the balance between a post that rebounded
Whitewood with three scorig posts. At the top of the playfield the five kickout holes can be seen.
Others about Wayne Neyens the ball and yet reliably operated the scoring switch. I was happy with the samples but felt more work was needed. Still, I believed I was far enough along with the scoring post to try the next stage: a kicking scoring post, a “pop post,” a mini pop bumper that would propel the ball away under power. The lower end of the shaft now was secured to a solenoid so when the post rose it was pulled down forcibly by the solenoid, driving the ball away. The post now had a very small metal skirt, like a pop bumper, but raised above a second plate flush with the playfield. The playing ball pushed the two plates together, making the circuit. I used a pop bumper driver board to do the rest. The result was not optimal, and the assembly was complicated and unreliable. I thought about sensing the rise of the ball with some non-contact means, like a proximity or hall-effect sensor but I knew that management would never accept such an arcane – and likely expensive – design. The mini pop-bumper idea died what I thought was a natural death but I wished I had received more encouragement on the plain scoring post. As for the rest of the playfield showing the five kick holes, this was an idea I had tried before (don’t recall if this playfield is the same as the earlier one. I tend to doubt it). There are five holes set in a slightly descending line with posts above and below. This arrangement was another of my subtle efforts to get a whiff of a bingo motif into a game! The first four holes were connected by a 4-station gang kicker as used in Sing Along but with the extra, fourth station (thanks to a supportive tool room). The fifth hole was a conventional kicker aimed down to the flipper just below. Landing in a hole scored as lit or unlit (the usual 500 or 5,000) then toggled it: if the hole was not lit when the ball kicked out, the hole would be lit. If it was lit when the ball kicked out, the hole went out. The holes were in various states of lit or unlit as the game played and the ball could enter any hole from below and progress down to the last hole. The object was to get all five holes lit then get the ball into the first hole. When the ball traversed all five lit holes, that was the Special. After that ball trip, all five holes would be off, and the game continues. The original game with that feature got very close to being accepted. I wanted to call it Wild Lemon but that smacked too much of gambling for Gottlieb. They actually gave it a name, Haunted House! At the last minute management withdrew both support and the name and conferred them onto the new 3-level game I was building. I also built a baseball game with a man-running display and a solenoid-operated pitching unit that everybody in Engineering liked. I thought for sure this would get built. I knew management would never go for a Williams-style pitching unit, so I built a simple throwing arm with a large solenoid attached. I made a traditional baseball game with the pitcher unit, ball flap, bat, and holes along the back for Single, Double, etc., including a hard-to-hit pocket between the holes for a home
John’s prototype solenoid-operated pitching unit
run. There was a diamond pattern of lights in the middle to show running and men on base. I used a smaller ball (7/8” I think) for fast action and asked Allen Edwal to write a special programme for the display. The first digit showed inning, then a space, then a digit for outs, then a space, then the last two digits for runs. No modifications to the cabinet were needed: one flipper button for pitch, the other for bat. The engineers and management played that game until the playfield was dark with wear and then, nothing. I thought I’d better reclaim that pitcher unit for posterity. Of course the same for the dice unit, which was probably the most complex unit I designed. I made a game using a video cabinet, sort of a floor-standing Kicker and Catcher. Small balls were dropped down a pachinko-like field with rollovers to boost scores, and the player tried to catch them at the bottom with a catching pan controlled by a hand-wheel on the front. Management liked the game enough that we built six finished sample games. They were put on locations in the area, but I don’t think they did too well. I think they might have been improved to make them more fun but as I recall they were brought back to the plant. I don’t know what became of them. I wish I had taken one home! If they still exist they would be among the rarest of Gottlieb games. One device I built was a single flipper that could be moved from side to side across the lower end of the playfield. That variable flipper seemed a good idea at the time, and some17
Others about Wayne Neyens thing really new. The flipper moved in the curved slot as the joystick was rotated. It was connected to a joystick on the front rail. The joystick had a button on the top to operate the flipper, and you rotate the joystick to move the flipper back and forth. There were other regular flippers on the playfield that could be operated together by either flipper button. The player had one hand on the joystick and the other hand on the side of the cabinet to control the remaining flippers. That worked out pretty well. I thought they were going to do that because John’s whitewood prototype with variable flipper and joystick. that was an inexpensive Below: Force II device. I called it the “variable flipper” but always thought it an awkward name. I never came up with a better one. One drawback – at a time when the company didn’t want to spend much money – was that the joystick would require a new front moulding, or some type of adaptor plate put on ahead of the normal moulding. The development never got that far. Everybody liked it, but I was afraid that friction would build up such that children, or someone with arthritis or otherwise not strong enough to rotate the stick would not play it. Again, we never got that far to consider reducing the amount of torque required to play it easily. In those days we were experimenting with the playfield size. Force II was our first multiball game, and I put it in a cabinet we called the “midsize.” It was bigger than a standard size, but not as big as the extra wide cabinet on Roller Disco. We were trying anything to keep the audience playing. You would think that a wide playfield would be more pinball to play, but it didn’t work out that way. They just turned out to be dull games. Maybe the ball was too small relative 18
to the playing area, or maybe there was just too much playfield. I don’t know what the answer was, but all our widebody games were dogs. Volcano PM: That skeeball type game that you developed, did that ever go anywhere? John Osborne: The closest thing to the skeeball game I did would have been on Volcano. There’s a small skeeball field in the upper right corner of that. In fact, I had made a skeeball game that management liked but then told me to put a small version of it into another game I was doing which became Volcano. The skeeball game was never built.
The main attraction on Volcano was a feature that I had tried to work into a game for years, where the ball would drop through a hole and then kick out someplace else. That is hard to do reliably. Then I got the bright idea of taking the ball return unit, straightening out the hump, and mounting it underneath the playfield. That worked really well. It was smooth, without a loud 120 Volt solenoid kick. I had two holes at the top, with hole flaps underneath them. Because hole flaps hadn’t been seen on a game since the manual ball lift disappeared, the player would think the holes were normal kick-holes. The ball falls into a hole and vanishes. It’s the sort of surprise that is so pleasing to the player. The same effect is produced by the roll-down target in Haunted House. A couple of seconds later it comes out that ball exit in the middle of the playfield. I also set it up that you could shoot the ball back down into that ball return kicker. It made a very satisfying shot, and not too difficult since it was close to the flippers. However, after the game left my hands, somebody got the bright idea to put a flap (like a pitching flap)
Others about Wayne Neyens
The flap covering the ball kickout in Volcano.
over that hole and make it multiball. I was not involved in that decision. The game was never as good and, of course, inevitably, the emerging balls got stuck under the flap. On any baseball game with a pitching flap, the pitching arm drives the ball all the way up to the playfield surface. Thus, the ball is thus pushed the entire way, and the ball can’t get stuck under the flap. My kicker was not designed to work that way. For me, Volcano was ruined by a hasty decision. PM: You started designing electromechanical games and then had to switch to designing solid-state games. How did that affect you as a designer? John Osborne: First, we had to learn the system. That was difficult for me because it really wasn’t explained to us that well. Once we had the hardware to run games and try different things the learning came faster. The wiring and the connectors were also different. The wiring had to be changed from cotton insulation to plastic because of the crimped terminals and Molex connectors. We lost a lot of colors from that change. Eventually, we went to a system using all- white wires with three stripes, and that worked well for us. For example, the first wire was 000, white with three black stripes. The next wire is 001, two black and one brown stripe. At the end of that series was 110, brown-brown-black. The first two numbers were always the same to prevent the stripes from being read backward. As before, there was no need to create a new lightbox, but now there was no bottom board to create, either. The biggest change were the limitations on the playfield layout and in 19
Others about Wayne Neyens the program. Planning the playfield was different owing to the restrictions on the number of controlled lights and solenoids. There were never enough, and they had to be used wisely. When it came time to do the programming, we had only four formatted pages to write down the programme code, and they filled up quickly. For System I we had PROM chips that could be burned only once. We threw out lots of chips! To do the actual programming we had a ROMulator and the RAM pack. The ROMulator was a keyboard with a display, and the RAM pack was plugged into it. The RAM pack was programmed by typing in the coding on the ROMulator keyboard. Afterward, the RAMpack was connected to the board in the game lightbox, and the game ran from it. It was then that errors in programming would show up, and changes could easily be made at the keyboard attached to the RAM pack. Once the game was proven, a chip could be burned to save the programme. The problem was, we had just one chip burner, which was in an office down the hall from my room. The batteries in the RAMpacks were notoriously weak. The moment the RAMpack was unplugged its memory started to fade slowly. Once the battery was gone, the programme was gone. PM: The only way to burn a chip was to go to the office where the burner was and get it prepared; make sure it was turned on and that no one else was using it. A blank chip is loaded, then I returned to my room, yanked the RAMpack and ran to the office and slammed it onto the burner before the battery light faded out. A couple of times I didn’t make it, so I had to punch everything in all over again. It was pretty crude. The arrival of System 2 solved many problems. There were more lamp drivers, and an extra four pages for programming, for a total of eight. Now it was almost impossible to run out of programming space. Also, EPROMS were used, and these could be erased and reused. There were also more registers for logic, one for each player. This meant that the status of each player was saved after each ball so a game could now be set up like a single-player, with sequences that required more than one ball to complete. PM: The switch to solid-state pinball also meant the end of the single-player games. Why was that? John Osborne: All games were 4-players because there was no memory. You could not make a single-player game where the game would remember what you had achieved from ball to ball. With System 2 there was player memory, and I used in Force II to save hit drop targets. When the player came up again the drop targets that had been down after the previous ball were dropped by energizing the dropping coils – created by Krynski. I don’t recall that a true single-player motif game was ever made, probably because by then it was felt that players no longer cared about such things. 20
Others about Wayne Neyens That’s odd. Electromechanical games had no memory either. You just plunged five balls, one after the other. Couldn’t you just do that? Like when the game detects the ball is back in the outhole, to kick it into the shooter lane for three or five times, without resetting the playfield after each drain? Then you would just continue without having to start over again. John Osborne: With an EM multiple-player game, every ball has to be a “first ball.” No way of saving playfield condition is possible. With no reset, the second player would inherit the first player’s progress on the sequence, an untenable condition. Thus whatever has to be done to complete a sequence, win an extra ball, or light the special must be done in one ball. Conversely, in a single-player game, the same player has five (or three) balls to complete a sequence that may have 15 numbers. PM: If we look at the games you designed, Haunted House – with its three playfields – is an absolute classic. John Osborne: I guess it is if you can find one that plays. I wrote an article about the development of that game, published in Gameroom Magazine in February of 1998. The biggest problem I had with that game was the upkicker – dubbed “upchucker” by Ed Krynski – that kicks the ball from the lower playfield up to the top. Originally that was just another solenoid driver, and it seemed to be satisfactory. However, after the game was in the field reports came in that the kicker was not always strong enough to kick the ball all the way up and out. Our solution was to put a local relay with large tungsten points right next to the kicker and have the relay coil powered from the solenoid driver board. That eliminated voltage drop from the driver. That made more power available to the solenoid, and that seemed to be the lasting solution. PM: Haunted House appears to be your last game design and also your best-selling one. John Osborne: Well, that game did come pretty late. I made other things after that, but nothing that made it out the door. I left the company in ’84, two years after Haunted House came out. PM: How do you look back on working with Wayne? John Osborne: When I started at Gottlieb that was my first career job. I felt very lucky in having Wayne as a boss. I always thought of him as a mentor, someone always there if I needed help. My father had died a few years prior, and Wayne was just the right person at the right time. Moving across country, so many new things in my life, I had Wayne to fall back on. This on top of having a dream job. I was so
John Osborne and Wayne Neyens in July 2018, celebrating Wayne’s 100th birthday.
glad to know him. He was just one smart guy. I don’t know anybody who didn’t like him. He didn’t get mad very often. He had a good time I think. One thing that would irritate him – maybe he had a bad experience – was a dropped schematic on the floor. He would firmly insist it be picked up at once. I’ve stayed in touch with him since he left the company and I no longer saw him every day. I moved back to California in 1984, and by then Wayne was Arkansas. I still have all the letters that he wrote me, both typed and email. I know he corresponds with many friends, many of whom have since passed, and I don’t know how many of them are ex-Gottlieb employees. I feel fortunate that he still writes to me and that we are still in each other’s lives. Except for my relatives, I think I have known Wayne longer than any other person currently in my life. << 21
PI N BALL
M
A
G
A
Z
I
N
E
( I t â&#x20AC;&#x2122; s m o r e l i k e a b o o k)
Pinball Magazine No. 1 128 pages
Santiago Ciuffo - Pinball coffee table photo book
Pinball Magazine No. 2 188 pages (sold out)
PINBALL M AGAZINE
P I N B A L LL MM
AA
G
A A
ZZ
II
NN
N o.5 Wayne Neyens, Scott go Gaming, Jack
Danesi, Chica Danger and more
Special: Wayne
Ne
yens His entire car eer at Western and D. Gottlieb including ove r contributions 150 game designs by Gordon Has se, Bob Herbiso n, Larry Zartaria Plus: Pinball n + others Resource, Chica go Scott Danesi, Jack Danger, and Gaming, much more ISBN 978-90-
816266-6-8
Pinball Magazine No. 3 260 pages
Pinball Magazine No. 4 244 pages
Pinball Magazine No. 5 (available soon)
for more info visit: www.pinball-magazine.com 22
EE
55